In an April Pajamas Media exclusive, while conceding that doing so in 2007 or 2008 would have paid off handsomely, Ira Stoll wondered whether it might still be a good time to short carbon credits. His fear was that, despite the mountain of inconvenient facts in the way, Congress will still “impose a vast new regulatory regime on energy consumption.”

It has become clear that the current Congress isn’t willing to do that. If the House were to get its way, dumb ideas like the ban on incandescent bulbs would be repealed. But the House probably won’t get its way, because Harry “coal makes us sick, oil makes us sick” Reid still runs the Senate, and Barack “Green Jobs, Clean Jobs” Obama is still President.

In the face of clear congressional opposition to going any further with regulating and taxing energy consumption, the administration has decisively shifted to a posture of “We don’t need Congress to impose our ‘green’ will on America.” Readers will see why shortly.

What’s amazing is that the scientific justification for doing so, which was never really there in the first place, has virtually evaporated. Meanwhile, the frightening economic costs of “going green” have never been clearer. All one has to do is periodically visit the web site of The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the home of the indefatigable Dr. Benny Peiser, to see how true these assertions really are.

On the science side, here are just a few items which appeared in the week preceding the writing of this column:

On July 9, GWPF excerpted a post by climate scientist Dr. Roy Spencer, Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, noting that the global average sea surface temperature is a tad lower than it was in 2002.

A July 6 article reported that British scientists who study the sun, which sane people realize has the predominant impact on our planet’s temperature, are concerned that it might be “coming to the end of a ‘grand solar maximum,’” meaning that we could be heading towards colder winters, not warmer ones. What they found essentially corroborates sun-related concerns raised by American scientists that the earth “may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade.” What was that about the supposedly “settled science” that the earth is warming?

On July 4, Dr. David Whitehouse of the foundation’s academic advisory council observed that even global warming true believers have been forced to admit that “there has been no global temperature increase since 1998,” but that they’re making up the most bizarre of excuses — Chinese coal dust! — to assure cultists that the earth is still fundamentally warming, but we somehow aren’t seeing it.

Even though the bogus science of global warming, which I have been referring to for several years as “globaloney” (though I don’t claim to be the first to coin the term), is on the run, its effects on citizens’ pocketbooks are being felt around the world — and politicians are beginning to feel serious electoral heat as a result. Here again from GWPF are just a few relatively recent items:

A July 11 post on UK carbon taxation linking to the UK Daily Mail reveals that the government is establishing “minimum price guarantees, higher than the normal market price, for the electricity generated by new wind farms and nuclear power stations.” This will cost UK households as much as 1,000 British pounds (about $1,600 US) per year. President Barack “Energy bills will necessarily skyrocket” Obama will be likely be pleased to know that this is described as “send(ing) bills rocketing.”

A related entry which links to a two-weeks-earlier Daily Mail item predicts that the heavy overpayments for “green” energy sources “could push tens of thousands of households into fuel poverty but do nothing to reduce emissions.” As a result, “30,000 to 60,000 more households will be … spending more than 10 per cent of … disposable income on heat and light.” It’s reasonable to believe that this estimate is low.

The foundation links to a July 11 Australia Herald-Sun report on that country’s Labor Party’s “Suicide Sunday,” which describes the blowback from Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s $24.5 billion (about $26 billion US$) carbon tax announcement. Specifically, “More than 70% of voters” in a plebiscite “said they now planned to vote for the Coalition (the opposition party) at the next election while just 8.51 per cent said they would support a Labor government.”

What’s happening in Australia, along with the well-deserved opprobrium the United Nations is receiving for telling the world it will “only” need $76 trillion to enable the world to comprehensively “go green,” explains why the Obama administration is trying to do all it can to impose its green will under the radar.

Even at that, Devon Swezey, a dedicated lefty with the Breakthrough Institute, whose mission is “to modernize liberal-progressive-green politics,” predicts that “The global clean energy industry is set for a major crash.” You might think that this is good news for free-market advocates, but Swezey believes the opposite, and is more than likely working towards it. Swezey expects “a comprehensive energy innovation strategy to develop, manufacture, and deploy riskier but more promising clean energy technologies that may eventually compete with fossil energy at scale” to rise out of the ashes. Unspoken but obvious: Only the federal government can (try to) run this, and pretty much only by force. Welcome to the world of five-year plans and “comprehensive” de facto control over energy resources.

If you think facts are going to matter in Swezey’s world, think again. As Ben-Peter Terpstra wrote at American Thinker in November 2009: “[w]hen green Leftists try to shut down a democracy it isn’t because they can defend their arguments, it’s because they can’t.” Soon, it may become as dangerous to tell the truth about globaloney as certain Argentine economists have recently found telling the truth about inflation to be.

In this fearsome context, going short on carbon credits is far from a surefire winner.

3 Comments

Tom, another great post.
Facts don’t matter to Leftist, only power matters to them.
Did you read the latest post from Ann Barnhardt?
Here it is:

HTTP://BARNHARDT.BIZ/INDEX.CFM
BERNANKE CONFIRMS QE3 A GO
POSTED BY ANN BARNHARDT – JULY 13, AD 2011 9:42 AM MST
“When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing; when you see that money is flowing to those who deal not in goods, but in favors; when you see that men get rich more easily by graft than by work, and your laws no longer protect you against them, but protect them against you…you may know that your society is doomed.”
- Ayn Rand – Atlas Shrugged
Citation Here: http://www.cnbc.com/id/43739458

You knew this was coming. Also, the fake “debt ceiling” will be raised by $2T. Geithner told Congress on May 4th that that was what was going to happen, repeatedly stressing that “they” needed $2T to spend BEFORE THE ELECTION. Everything was relative to the date of the 2012 election. I PROMISE YOU, the Republicans will fold within days and the original $2T demand from Geithner WILL be given to Obama. Mitch McConnell has already leaked how it will be done – in three “installments”. Everything you are seeing right now is pure theater. And we are falling for it like the total chumps that we are.

Talk is starting to enter the metals trade that gold could be on the brink of a massive “parabolic” run akin to the Minneapolis Wheat market of 2008, wherein the price of wheat increased almost 500%. Assuming a starting point of $1500 gold, that would take gold to $7500 per ounce. But don’t worry. I’m sure that will have ZERO effect on crude oil prices – or at the very least will be offset by all of the wonderful efficiency advances in “green energy”.

One more time, because people still aren’t comprehending this. Bernanke is not trying to “help” the economy. Bernanke does not actually believe that printing more money is going to “help” or “stimulate” anything, because actually stimulating the economy is NOT his objective. His objective, with the Obama-Soros regime, is collapsing and destroying the economy. Bernanke is not “surprised” at the fact that economic growth is nil and that there is no recovery. No one is that stupid. Don’t get me wrong – Bernanke is indeed stupid – but NO ONE IS THAT STUPID. Bernanke is a criminal and a liar who, for some reason, be it bribery, threats against him or his family, or just plain Marxist malice, is consciously trying to collapse the economy. Read this over and over again until you fully understand. There is no rational explanation for any of this, just as there is no rational explanation for throwing gasoline on a fire that you claim you are trying to extinguish. We are at war, and these people are the enemy just as sure as the Nazis and Japanese were the enemy in WW2.

Silver is up 2.50 per ounce and gold is making new all-time highs, and we will probably see $1600 gold by Friday’s close. Corn is up 70 cents per bushel since YESTERDAY.

Guys, when I say no naked short hedges and stay the hell out of the way, I really, really mean it. Shorting an inflationary market is not managing your risk. It is suicide. The reason these brokers and consultants keep preaching to you that you need to “hedge” is because they are imbeciles who only know a few buzzwords and catchphrases, which they parrot mindlessly because that is all they can do. They aren’t “smart”. My God, they can’t even figure out that being short in an inflating market is going to result in UNNECESSARY LOSSES and will convert your physical commodity inventory back into evaporating U.S. dollars. If the risk is wealth destruction from holding U.S. dollars, how stupid do you have to be to recommend that people convert their physical assets back into U.S. dollars via uber-leveraged derivatives – and then call that “risk management”? Seriously. Sit in stillness with that.

UPDATE: Here is Ron Paul grilling Bernanke this morning. Bernanke actually says that gold is not money and the only reason central banks hold it is “tradition”. I kid you not. If gold isn’t money, then there is no money. Think about that for a moment.

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